janedavitt

I often trawl the sites with free ebooks; new releases marked down to promote interest in a series or very old books that are in the public domain.

Yesterday I found that Project Gutenberg Australia had Diary of a Provincial lady and The PL Goes Further, by E M Delafield! I've been looking for ebooks of the PL series for ages; I own them all, even the Russian one, but there's something very satisfying about having them on my Kobo. Usually, some of her lesser known novels are on the sites, but not the PL ones.

I also found a Kindle version of a very rare Elinor M Brent-Dyer The School by the River on Amazon; not free, but well worth $9.99. Only a handful of physical copies of the book exist, so being able to find/afford one was unlikely, but Girls Gone By are reprinting many books like this, beautiful facsimile editions with original cover/illustrations. I hadn't realized they were starting to make them into ebooks too, but I'm very chuffed.

Ditto for two D E Stevenson books. I snapped up Mrs Tim of the Regiment when it was on special offer last month but I'm trying to resist pre-ordering Miss Buncle's Book. Ten dollars is a lot for an ebook I own, but I adore that book so much. Strangely, there's a twelve dollar version out now.

This one was 'Bullet'. I can't remember the last one I actually bought, but I usually get them from the library with a weird mixture of impending disappointment and annoyance to the fore. I shouldn't do it. I know I'm going to get pouty remembering how fresh and good the first two or three were and how unutterably dire the series is these days, but it's classic train-wreck syndrome and I can't help myself.

And she did it again ::sigh:: Whole book covered 24 hours or so, Anita bonked everything that moved, and the exciting bit, you know, the actual PLOT was covered in a two page epilogue where she casually tossed out lines along the lines of 'After that, we all flew out to city X and defeated Y'.

I'm not making that up. Hundreds of pages telling us what new leather outfit or tarty dress Anita's changed into or the color of the silk sheets and then an actual exciting, important battle gets ONE FRIGGING SENTENCE.

The most annoying thing though was the frankly appalling editing. At least three times, I had to go back over a chunk of dialog only to realize that Anita said something twice and no one editing noticed and punctuated accordingly. So a phone conversation looks like this:

"Hi, how are you?"

"I'm fine, Anita, how are you and your harem?"

"Just dandy, thank you."

"I just killed a man."

"Did you, Anita? I hope it didn't interfere with the orgy?"


See what happened there in the middle? The editor didn't.

We just got back from a BBQ with friends, one of whom is the friend I do yoga with. She had a cool new watch on, which I admired. I found out it was $225 which put it way outside my price range, but it's adorable and sort of yoga related.

http://www.fruitzwatches.com/

They come in all these different colors and they have something in them that makes your body resonate at the same frequency as the earth or something like that (her husband and David work together and as engineers were incredibly skeptical, heh)

http://www.fruitzwatches.com/discover/technology.html

I just think they look cool. I love the golden pear (she's got the lime one and is saving up for the golden pear) and the plum.


She'd also bought a new yoga book that I greeted with cries of squeefulness. Hilarious.

Barbar's Yoga for Elephants


I now see why I struggle with some poses. I have no trunk. All is clear to me.

I just checked the calendar and I'm a week overdue after being early for months now. Oooookay. That might explain why my mood is set on 'grouchy' with a side order of 'fist of death'.

Sorry ::is penitent::

I cheered myself up with a bowl of chocolate ice cream, half an episode of TS and a few chapters of The Joyous Season with Talisker purring on my lap.

That worked pretty well :-)

Does anyone know Patrick Dennis who write The Joyous Season? He's best known for Auntie Mame which I devoured at the age of ten and found pretty spicy. He was well regarded, rich, and famous (three books on the best seller list simultaneously) and then dropped into obscurity and -- incredibly -- became a butler a few years before his early death from pancreatic cancer, buttling for, amongst other people, the founder of MacDonalds.

My mother and I both loved his books, and have managed, over the years and many library sales, to build up a complete set for Mum and a nearly so one for me. Finding First Lady in a tiny used book store on a remote country lane on my honeymoon in Canada was a huge thrill. I picked up his biography, Uncle Mame by Eric Myers, a few years ago which was a little sad to read. Not an easy life.

Dennis, who was bisexual, was pretty much the king of camp and his books are hilarious, incisive and often dark. He exposes the racist, the snobbish, the pretentious and does it without much mercy. Definitely one of my formative literary influences.

And, ooh, I just checked Amazon and quite a few of his books are back in print including The Joyous Season.

Okay, now I really do feel happier :-)